Leopard

A leopard can drag an antelope heavier than itself straight up a tree, gripping the carcass in its jaws while climbing a vertical trunk.

It does this so lions and hyenas cannot steal the meal, and it is the single thing that makes leopards so successful. They hunt in the same places as bigger, stronger predators and simply take their dinner out of reach.

Leopards are the most adaptable of the big cats and live across more of the world than any of the others, from African savanna to Siberian forest to the edges of Indian cities. They are also disappearing quietly from most of it.

The leopard’s scientific name is Panthera pardus.

• Kingdom: Animalia
• Phylum: Chordata
• Class: Mammalia
• Order: Carnivora
• Family: Felidae
• Genus: Panthera
• Species: Panthera pardus

Being in Panthera makes the leopard a true big cat alongside the lion, tiger and jaguar, and means it can roar. A leopard’s roar sounds like a saw cutting wood.

Eight subspecies are usually recognized, including the African leopard, the Indian leopard, and the Amur leopard of far eastern Russia, which is one of the rarest cats in the world.

There is no such species. A black panther is a leopard or a jaguar with a dark coat.

The condition is called melanism, caused by a gene that floods the coat with dark pigment. In Africa and Asia a black panther is a leopard; in the Americas it is a jaguar.

The rosettes are still there. Photograph a black leopard in the right light, or in infrared, and the spot pattern appears clearly underneath the black, like a watermark.

Dark leopards are commonest in dense tropical forest, where low light makes a dark coat useful, and they are rare on open savanna.

Leopards measure 3 to 6 feet in the body with a tail of about 2 to 3.5 feet, and weigh 60 to 200 pounds. Males are substantially larger than females.

• Rosettes. Rose-shaped clusters of spots, unique to each animal, breaking up the cat’s outline in dappled light.
• Shoulders and neck. Exceptionally powerful, built for hauling heavy prey vertically up a trunk.
• Tail. Long, used for balance in trees, and often curled at the tip as a signal for cubs to follow.
• Whiskers. Long and sensitive for feeling the way through undergrowth at night.
• Hearing and night vision. Both far better than ours; a leopard sees roughly seven times better than a person in the dark.

Size varies enormously by region. Leopards living alongside lions and hyenas tend to be larger, while those on islands and in dense forest are considerably smaller.

Leopards have the widest range of any big cat, across sub-Saharan Africa and through Asia to India, China and the Russian Far East.

They use almost every habitat available: rainforest, savanna, mountains, desert edge, scrub and snow-covered forest. Amur leopards live where winter temperatures fall below minus 20.

They also live closer to people than any other big cat. Leopards hunt on the edges of Indian cities, including Mumbai, where they move through suburbs at night and most residents never see one.

Despite all that, they have lost perhaps three quarters of their historic range.

Leopards are carnivores and the least fussy of the big cats. They have been recorded eating nearly 100 different species: antelope, deer, warthog, monkeys, birds, rodents, fish, reptiles, and insects such as dung beetles.

They hunt by stalking, getting within about 15 feet before rushing, and kill with a bite to the throat or neck.

Then comes the trick. A leopard carries the kill into a tree, sometimes hauling an animal heavier than itself up 20 feet of trunk, and wedges it in a fork. Up there it is safe from lions and hyenas, and the leopard can feed over several days.

That ability to eat anything and protect it is why leopards survive where other big cats fail.

Leopards are solitary and secretive, which is why they are so often present without being noticed. Each defends a territory, marked with scent, claw marks on trees and a rasping call.

They are active mainly at night, and more so where people are around.

They are extraordinary climbers, able to descend a trunk head-first, and they rest draped over branches through the heat of the day.

They are also strong swimmers, unlike most cats, and will take fish and crabs.

A leopard can run about 35 miles an hour, leap 20 feet forward and 10 feet straight up.

Pregnancy lasts about three months and produces two to four cubs, born blind in a cave, a hollow tree or dense thicket.

The mother moves them between hiding places every few days so predators cannot learn where they are. Even so, many cubs die young, taken by lions, hyenas and other leopards.

Cubs stay with their mother for 18 months to two years, learning to hunt and to climb, then leave to find territory of their own. Daughters often settle near their mother; sons travel far.

Leopards live 12 to 17 years in the wild and over 20 in captivity.

Adult leopards are rarely killed by other animals, though lions, tigers, hyena packs and wild dogs will kill them given the chance, and cubs are very vulnerable.

Human pressures are what matter: habitat loss as land is cleared, loss of the prey they depend on to bushmeat hunting, killing in retaliation for livestock, and poaching for skins and for bones sold in traditional medicine as tiger substitutes.

Conflict is the hard problem. A leopard living beside a village will eventually take a goat or a dog, and the usual response is a dead leopard.

The leopard is listed as Vulnerable, and numbers are falling across most of its range. It has lost roughly 75 percent of the territory it once held.

Several subspecies are in far worse shape. The Amur leopard of Russia and China is Critically Endangered, down to around 100 animals, making it one of the rarest cats on Earth. The Javan, Arabian and Persian leopards are also Critically Endangered or Endangered.

Because leopards are secretive and still present in many places, their decline attracted far less attention than the tiger’s, and protection came later as a result.

There is some good news: Amur leopard numbers have roughly doubled from a low of around 30, through protected parks on both sides of the Russian-Chinese border.

As a top predator, the leopard controls the numbers of a very wide range of animals, which keeps any one species from overwhelming the rest.

Near Indian cities they do something unexpectedly useful: leopards living around Mumbai eat large numbers of feral dogs, and researchers estimate this prevents a substantial number of dog bites and rabies cases each year.

Their tree caches feed other animals too, since scraps fall and scavengers collect below.

And because they need large connected areas with healthy prey, protecting leopards protects whole landscapes, which benefits everything else living in them.